The Press and Obama: Where's that Lovin' Feeling?

It began, as many love affairs do, with infatuation. The MSM fancies itself to be a cynical watchdog, speaking truth to power and capable of toppling the mighty. But when self-described cynics fall in love, they can fall pretty hard.

That’s the way the press fell for Obama, complete with unaccustomed leg thrills and oohing and ahhing over his perfectly creased pants. He was an ultra-liberal dream come true, the one they had been waiting for.

But that was then; this is now. Obama has been president for a bit less than a year and a half, and during that time he’s increasingly treated the press with the callous disregard and outright contempt displayed by those who are so certain they are loved by a worshful underling that they fear neither abandonment nor loss of affection.

…[I]t's not just the infrequency of hour-long press conferences (six since taking office, including just four during prime-time). Obama has had far fewer short question-and-answer sessions with the press pool than did his two immediate predecessors: only 53 in his first 15 months in office, versus 176 for President Bush and 312 for President Clinton, says Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University in Towson, Md.

It’s a classic pursuer-distancer dynamic: as the distancer in the love affair plays hard to get, it only increases that person’s perceived desirability in the eyes of the smitten pursuer -- for a while, anyway. As Obama continued to distance himself, the press courted his favors, dutifully blamed Bush for bequeathing him “inherited” problems, gave him advice on how to fix things and credit for a bipartisanship he never demonstrated, applauded his big-government goals, admired his pugnacious attacks on the opposition, winked at his hypocrisies as being necessary for strategic reasons, and denied or ignored his lies.

But something has changed lately. Many of Obama’s supporters in the press have become increasingly perturbed as they have come to sense that there is something “off” about the man.

Some of this reaction in the press may be the bubbling up of resentment at having been treated so badly. But there appears to be more than that going on: disappointment and bitterness and even embarrassment are starting to set in, much of it coalescing around Obama’s performance regarding the oil spill. This particular event has presented the left with a highly visible crisis concerning an issue that means a great deal to them -- energy and the environment -- and on which Obama was supposed to lead in a manner completely different from his predecessor Bush.

Did I say “lead”? That’s exactly what Obama has not done, and the left and the press are shocked and stunned.

It has been especially difficult to pin this disaster on Bush, although there have been half-hearted efforts in that direction (and there’s always bad guy BP to blame). But even the left and Obama’s supporters in the press seem to realize that Obama has come to own the oil spill, and that there has been something really, really wrong with his reaction to it.